The author, Emanuele Tatti, decided to start playing with Merapi creating a AIR client for the
Skype chat; first of all I started searching for a Java implementation
of the Skype communication API. I found this project
"http://skype.sourceforge.jp/index.php?Skype%20API%20For%20Java%20(English)",
officially supported by Skype https://developer.skype.com/wiki/Java_API
It's a well written and powerful library so it was very easy to understand.

The course Flash Media Server 3.5: Developing rich media applications provides for the acquisition of competences necessary for the creation
of applications of high multimedia content. Through examples and real
applications the participants will be accompanied through a gradual
didactic path which will guide them until they arrive at the knowledge
of the server and its management and programming.

I'm following with interest the Amethyst project, that is a Flex IDE for Visual Studio.NET.

Today I've received an email that pointed out the following news: Have a first look at the ‘Amethyst Designer’ which is the
drag-and-drop design environment for the forthcoming ‘Professional’
edition of Amethyst. I’ve just recorded a short (4 minute) screencast
showing a few of its capabilities. I’ve written a blog entry about this
here:

Tomorrow I'll present at JavaDay conference in Rome. JavaDay is the biggest event in Italy driven by the Sun community. Last year more that 1.000 people parteciped and I'm pretty sure this year it'll be a greater success.

Comtaste we'll be present at the conference (this year too) talking about the integration of Flex in Java and J2EE enviroment using Livecycle Data Services and BlazeDS.

For the article the author used an excerpt from my book in the section "Connect to Amazon S3 in a Flash" to explain the fact that SWF file cannot read data from a "remote" host without explicit consent. (You can find the rationale for this mandate and a complete description of Flash security measures in the white paper, "Adobe Flash Player 9 Security.")

When you interact with a desktop application, you’re used to using general menus that guide you and introduce you to the functions you can choose from. For example, if you’re using a word-processing program and you want to know which formats you can save the document in, you will almost definitely look for the Save as command from the File menu, without even thinking about it. Likewise, if you need to copy the selected text, you’ll look for the Copy command from the Edit menu. These operations are strongly embedded in every user that has experience with modern computers. Regardless of any previous knowledge about the program you’re working on, the menu bar will always be a safe haven where you can look for the commands and functions you need. Some modern software applications have interfaces that mimic the standards of many web applications. These applications don’t have traditional menus—they only provide icons in the application, and these are sometimes difficult to interpret. When users access one of these programs for the first time, they may feel disoriented, and may not even understand how to start using the application.AIR puts users at ease by supporting a traditional menu bar that guides them through the features of your application. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, there are two types of menus for AIR applications: application menus (on Mac OS X systems) and window menus (on Microsoft Windows systems).To know which type of menu you can use in your application, AIR provides the supportsMenu property in the NativeApplication class as well as in the NativeWindow class . These are Boolean properties and they show whether the menus are supported at the application or window level. To check if application- level menus are supported, you can use the following code:

Don't loose the occasion to get inspired by cool speakers at the FITC
2009.FITC returns to Amsterdam, The Netherlands with two days of presentations
and one day of workshops focused on all aspects of Interactive design
and development, February 22-24, 2009 at the Felix Meritis European
Centre for Arts and Sciences.

The
much acclaimed two-day event includes over 40 presentations covering
business, creative and technical subjects, plus pre-festival workshops,
and nightly parties as only FITC can deliver. This is the second year
for FITC Amsterdam, which last year sold out over a month in advance.See you there !

Huw Collingbourne sent me an mail to let me know that they have just
released the second beta which now includes IntelliSense. From the website:

This release has Flex IntelliSense, including syntax-sensitive code
completion for both the ActionScript programming language and MXML
formatting code. It also provides code completion for import
statements and keywords. As we have previously announced, we shall
release Amethyst in two editions: the free Personal Edition will
include code completion for ActionScript; however, some IntelliSense
features may be provided in the ‘Professional’ edition only. The
current beta includes elements from both editions.

I'm very proud to announce that our first ecommerce initiative has been succesfully released and deployed. Studioarch.com, a Piquadro boutique in Rome, Italy, is the heir of the long
Studioarch tradition, a historical sales point in the sector of graphics, fine
arts and designer objects, founded in Rome back in 1968. Piquadro is a specialist producer of travel and business luggage, the company has always
been characterised by a blend of traditional Italian craftsmanship, quality,
design, innovation and technology. For the backend we've used the open source platform Magento (after spent 2 weeks on evaluating different paltforms) and we're very happy about our decision.

This is a list of Pros and Cons of Magento we found:

Pro:
Free and opensource platform
Feature-rich solution
Based on Zend Framework
Good SEO
Good support for localization
Fast-growing community
Easy update
Easily manageable extensions
and much more...

Cons:
Not much documentation (there is a growing wiki and a nice forum, but
it is still difficult to find the answer you are looking for)
Importing products not yet fully supported (import script needs some tricks and workarounds to be used)
European tax system not fully supported (VAT, B2B, B2C..., check first if what you need is supported)
Internationalization may not be complete (depending on your language)
Still many bugs (but development and bug fixing is on the go, the last release is from 1.1.8 November 26, 2008)
and maybe some more...

Aptana is a great IDE to develop AIR applications using JavaScript. I prefer it to Dreamweaver CS4.I've just received the monthly newsletter where I've learned that they added the support to AIR 1.5 (as well as Mootools 1.2.1 and jQuery 1.3) :

Support for Mootools 1.2.1 is now available. We've seen growing usage of Mootools in the Aptana Community and are excited to be working more closely with the Mootools team to make support for Mootools increasingly timely and coordinated.